The Curious Case of the Collapsing Coworkers

Working 24/7 is now our culture. Working forty hours a week is the new lazy. I know, because that’s what older people tell me. “You got to pay your dues,” they all said, so I never thought about what was too much to take on, or the potential consequences.

Then, eight years of working 55-65 hours a week left me suffering from severe chest pains at age 30. Doctors were baffled, as I am typically at an ideal weight, eat right, and exercise regularly. I wound up in the emergency room one weekend and endured a heart cath procedure, where they go in through your femoral artery and image your heart to see what’s wrong with it.

But there was nothing wrong with my heart.

Age: 31Diagnosis: Work stress. Prescription: Two weeks rest, stop working so much.

My company didn’t like that. “You’re too important to be off. Work from home, or else.” But the plug in my artery came loose, and I nearly had to have a blood transfusion, so I got one day off. Unpaid.

I know I’m not the only one who has experienced something like this, because I’ve seen it happen elsewhere. The next company I worked for purported to have a better culture, but a year in, one of my 30-something teammates suddenly collapsed during a project. Turned out he’d been working 60-70 hours a week for months. They rushed him to the hospital for an emergency heart cath, only to find nothing wrong with his heart.

Age: 39 Diagnosis: Work stress. Prescription: Two weeks rest, stop working so much.

The company balked. “We can’t make our deadline if you take two weeks off. Work remotely and lie to HR about it, or else.”

I got out of there before they could put me back in a hospital bed, but quickly discovered that overwork is an epidemic. My new employer soon revealed themselves to be severely understaffed. Their desktop support department consisted of just one man.

I overheard him expressing concerns about his hours and workload one day, and management replied that HR didn’t want to see any overtime on his paychecks. He asked how he could possibly do so much work in eight hours and they said, “Figure it out, or we’ll find someone else.”

So he continued working 14 hour days, with 6 hours unpaid. I wasn’t surprised when he collapsed on a business trip a month later and woke up in the hospital following an emergency heart cath.

Age: 38Diagnosis: Work stress. Prescription: Two weeks rest, and stop working so much.

Despite the doctor’s orders and the fact that he’d nearly dropped dead, the company ordered him to return to the site and finish his work upon release. “We don’t have anyone else, and times are tough. You should be happy you have a job,” they said.

I’d already posted a new resume by the time he told me. Meetings there featured jokes about “living” in the airport, spouses threatening divorce over the hours, and now employees collapsing from overwork.
Not very funny to me.

A small business is like a family, people said, so I sought to join one. I was hired and found that sentiment to be true, but I quickly found one coworker getting frequent shout-outs for responding to email at two or three in the morning. She’d give out her cell phone number and tell clients to call whenever. She often skipped lunch and talked about how she worked every evening, and every weekend.

But this time, I couldn’t fault the company. I rarely worked overtime there. She did that to herself, and kept trying to work despite doctor’s orders. The company eventually had to step in and temporarily take away her access.
So why include her? Or the helpdesk guy who willingly worked unpaid overtime?

Because we often choose to overwork ourselves. We don’t say no, and we don’t set boundaries to protect our work-life balance. Know the difference between working hard and being taken advantage of, and take it from someone who’s been to the edge – when you’re staring death in the face, you aren’t thinking, “I wish I’d spent more time working.”

You’re thinking about all the time you could’ve spent doing something else.

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John Spencer is a technology professional located in a blue city somewhere in deep red TX. He himself is best described as “purple”. He has a bachelor’s degree in English but works in technology and is best described as a jack of all IT trades but a master of none. He is currently working to correct the latter and is studying for a Master’s degree in technology while working full time.